Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

and it’s all lilacs now

and it’s all lilacs now, and it’s summer, leave the

windows open, keep the windows open kind of

summer. City breathing in past the balcony,

colliding on a crash course with my chest while

I’m staring, staring at the orange outside the

window while the light and air cradles my balls

and shines on her ass.

Listening to the natural and urban jazz passing

by, we’re making rhythm baby, we’re writing

melody, we’re improvising on the fly, we’re drums,

and birds, and horny, and we’re moving just like

seasons, and we are part of summer, and it’s all

lilacs now.

For once the pieces whole, all at once complete, all

come together, and I get it all, and I’m dripping

out of her, and it’s all lilacs now.

The melody resolves, the chord progression

played, the chords played by a fucking

triumphant parade of marching bands with

telecasters slung over their shoulders, and it’s

choreographed and overcast, choreographed on a

scale so grand it doesn’t seem planned. To the

untrained eye, cloudy, foggy, overcast, but now

we’re trained, now its clear, and now we

understand.

and shit I guess this is it, ya know, the big one,

what all the writers write about, what all

reporters report on, and what all analysts

analyze. But now it’s mine and it’s all cherry soda,

and it’s all lemon twists, and it’s Christmas,

firework displays, mangos, and lazy Saturdays. 

and if this isn’t it then fuck it, it’s the next best

thing, it’s the new thing

it’s the goddamn thing to do, and it’s all purple,

and it smells so sweet,

and it’s all lilacs now.

and if the empire falls around us, if it crumbles

and can’t stand back up then it’s all lilacs now

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

Cannes

Genes too small to feed to coin purses hollow the spoken glints of them,

The holes dug for money’s final death. Sonar intercepts a message

About whales, whose light crashes or is the rays of God’s best departure.

Dwarf pansies riot the flower burrows nearest the painted walls.

I barely remember being donated to research forever.

The unacceptable cooks broken eggs. She loves her foreign flag dress.

Tonight: the weathering of stone and a statue celebrates women.

A man in the arts asks himself again, “How do you?” apologize.

This time I am not trying to sleep on two metal millimeters.

I am child in the king’s lumber, the planet is a celeriac heart.

Artwork courtesy Texas Fontanella and John M. Bennett

 

The Poem Is Material Made of Letters Held at Arm’s Length

 

The poem’s an arm away letter air cloth

Unthere above where I understand cement

In the organs around my hips. Treeless,

The locked door clothes my arms with slate.

 

My mother’s hair, her peach moon chin

Like two letters as one question

The size of one person repeat themselves.

Tree the alert my actress friend learned, I’m linoleum.

People forget they could be rounded up to all pubes.

My father, a lavender flag, wants to curl.

Justin’s paper mirrors decorate the space between the moon and the earth.

I’m crude oil if a tulip melts.

No one thinks the four of us are family still.

 

Events make the triangles of their shadows

If they were construction paper in a sheaf.

These things follow me into the room –

Billboards for cloth they advertise in the dark.

 

My spine is part tree, part giraffe’s spine.

Heavier than pounds, I move like a tree if it dragged a tree.

The world is the size of a pearl,

Continents the ornamental geography of velcro.

I stop looking in the mirror temporarily.

Each letter I read flickers its hue

So night’s fan chews the felt quilt,

A machine doing guilt for me with its sound.

 

Clothes in their colors core days’ identities

And I have been wearing what flags do for countries.

Does the naked body have to be sexual

Because we are the animal whose hair halos

Cannot excuse the unlaugh of pubes

Or how small the penis really is when he walks nude,

His brain stuffed with hair, air his halo body of fear?

 

Night invaded the bathroom.

I ask to move out of the purple and black flag.

Instead of night cool it’s cloth after skin

With prescription follow up slaps.

Thread hangs from my dress instead of a spider.

 

Even facts sew protective ten point stars

On flags that would otherwise be the crashing into ten pillows

Against a wall if pillows were children’s stardust,

The girl’s French braids lifting the animal from her translucence.

She closes her eyes and laughs.

I have been living in a world

Where the imaginary and the real are clothes in a dance without people.

Artwork courtesy Texas Fontanella and John M. Bennet

Thurston Demands Moore

We must destroy the record companies; cake them and cream their box elder horns with flailing strumpets of pancake and waffle house menu-wrap plastic; mandrill-fuck their moons like tranquil toothed Hamptons in mucous—their un moveably zonked stilt-stadium festival of dry gums where Topekanese mongrels, chicken and slurp to calibrated android metronome dumplings of ego ascendant desert Mandrax orbits.

We must harness the soup of the naked where mulligan sloths of transcranial oscillations spin a single flurtzing electron; isolate its rock of hair-dryer-helmet implacability in eyeball trinket rumblings of myriad bulls; its depth row hung drumlin stacked est and ostrich—pyroclastic protuberances hackneyed to goat-brow nubness.

We must labyrinth into full fronded rooms of silly people playing unfathomed enormities—strenuous shredglass, like Uri- Geller-spoons of bent instruments, grappling hooks esteemed into whale sputum eternities, vibrating like unctuals of Devonian string—this bone house of cartilaginous lungfish, whose lava-lamp and metal-machine swords emit Brancanian mosaics of dorsal colossi weeping feedback extremities through glottal zebras of prime alveolar geothermals.

We must infer winglets of elbow, birded and trussed in deep feathers of tent, where none had been apparent before; and do it in a solemn and jocular incontinence of blathering sound, the drunk-cufflinks and spun gruzzet reverse-polarities of tuna-directionals; de-Abu-Ghraibify radar trones and brultims of ovarianated mulch—gorx the plutonium factrix of flamboyantly fracked steam-injectors, the paleazo-arctrons of copper scarred tectonics…

Until the world looks red

with white power sneakers

on the beautiful beat of black feet.

Artwork courtesy Texas Fontanella and John M Bennet

Riffing On Miles Davis

I don’t know if he ever practiced

until his fingers and lips grew numb–

a way, when he began to hurt, he knew style

and soul ran along the same line.

Call it nerve, which is what it took when he turned

his back on the audience

usually near a diminuendo, and why he did this

some call arrogance, but I think concentration, no

distractions. Some fans loved it and knew

he’d step back around–those long

slender fingers tapping as fast as rain on a tin roof shack,

one of many near Memphis Miles drove past

toward a gig. Imagine him picturing a woman

listening to the blues on a battered radio–

a baby crawling on the floor toward a slice

of fried baloney furled like a pig’s ear.

Picture it or not, Miles grew up, son of a dentist

I don’t know if he thought he had it too good,

especially after men in black leather ushered him in

a club’s back door in Chicago, though he and “Bird”

were the show. I don’t know when Miles

took his first hit of heroin.

But either way, between the highs and lows,

the shit and the beauty, here’s my favorite story,

about him: He stood in a hotel closet,

door open, his eyes and mouth closed.

Instead of Boo, I think he said, “Is this dark enough for you?”

Someone across the room flinched

and laughed at the same time, as Miles lifted

his trumpet and began to play.

Installment II: Poetry as a Sounding of Metaphor: 

One forgets, amidst the succession of disparate names (some of them being venerated and canonical historical gatekeepers like Beethoven, Mozart, the Beatles and Miles Davis), exactly how the process by which a piece of music becomes a part of one’s being transliterates sound into the molecular coherencies suffusing networks of intertwined cultural DNA. Mark E. Smith, Schooly D., or maybe Big Daddy Kane, or four anonymous looking androids from Akron Ohio, with esoteric electronics and voice modulators remembered from a loft party in 1979; Led Zeppelin, NWA, Wagner, Aaron Copeland, The Residents, Buffy St. Marie, Live Skull, or even the fucking Partridge Family; whomever triggered the response and wherever it may have occurred, it is the moment when the self dissolves, as in the act of erotic communion, into a variegated tuber-bundle of myriad other selves resonating to the echo of a particular place—a lifelong vibration jarring the sensorium.

Music is to sound, as poetry is to word, as dream is to thought; each entwining the other. Yet, they cannot be disentangled in the sense of defining where one begins and its counterpart ends, for it is not a relationship of continuity or dualism. Rather, the synergy is between manifestation and possibility, the idiosyncratic particularities woven from a spectrum of potential apertures of emergence; each wrapping its compliment in a translucent word bubble of reconceptualization, stylized and metaphoric, distilling the very mitochondria of an underlying thingness by displacing it into articulated fractals of ambiguous resonance, proliferating innumerable cross-pollinations of contingency—the arcane icons and symbols through which we show ourselves who we are, are becoming, want to be, or wish to evolve towards, at any given moment, in stroboscopic packets of infinitely condensed eidetic wisdom.    

It is about our respective vocabularies of sounds, construed as disparate lists of favored songs, treasured albums and thumb-drives of remembered ecstasies, apotheosized and reified into tangible aspects of the self. One is never sure where the desire to make something more real by documenting its existence or distilling it into ingredients/superlative moments/discrete properties, comes from: It could happen standing in the back of the old first avenue Bar and Grill/ CBGB’s/the Gas Station/ an apartment rooftop on the Lower East Side or the South Bronx; even sitting in the audience at Madison Square Garden or the Hollywood Bowl.

Music and poetry exponentially alter sound and meaning and, in searching for their own echo, bifurcate and repeat themselves—a mitosis which sometimes leads to mutation. This is the heart of art’s creatively proliferating DNA; it is unstable and yet also sublime, alchemically transforming everything within its sphere of influence, until it too is transformed by the process that it has set in motion. This harnessing of random energies is constantly re-inscribed into the clay palimpsest of the present moment; a moment built on countless prior moments, invariably boiling over in a crescendo of decisive inertia.

It is inevitable then that one should write of sound, and its emotional resonance, and reinscribe its tonality with the coded symbology of words. Such an act translates the qualities of one idiom into another, profoundly altering the essence of one variety of experience through gestures forged within the heart of an incommensurable knowledge, thereby encoding a radical form of synesthesia, a metaphoric alchemy integral to both music and to poetry. Accordingly, it is only natural to take the poetry of music and express its vision in words, knowing full well that its structure will ineluctably change in the course of translation.

Such evocations can take the form of lists, raves, reflections, one-sided epistolary expressions, dedications, inspirations, and polemical arguments, the squashing of existing canons, autobiographical narratives, and descriptions of un-producible esoteric songs or movie soundtracks, even surreal attempts at impossible transcriptions. The varieties of such poetry are infinite, and can mutate into a multiverse of hybrids and miscegenation’s, as varied as the sound-cultures which might have inspired them. Hence, the possibilities for transcendence, inherent in the exploration and creation of new worlds, are perfectly inscribed in Hassan i Sabbah’s famous maxim, “Nothing is true, everything is permissible.”

Let this credo of epistemological terrorism function, in this instance, as a prompt and a challenge. Write what you like; reinvent the familiar as something new, transforming sound back into primordial breath; restoring through poetry a unity whose ghostly vigor still haunts the disassociated sub-divisions compartmentalizing the contemporary landscape. Send it in to dimcitylit[at]gmail[dot]com with “Installment Two” as the subject.

– J Zachary Rothstein 

 a collaboration between J. Zachary Rothstein and Hanz Olson

“We’ve created it and now are its martyrs; it comes, greeting any saint with new flame, any bird or flower, like a blinded thing” (Alice Notley, “The Black Trailer”).

Reawakened kraken ballast, hulls of brundilleum, fences are blinders of amphibian meshing, distilled into feathers, flighty ideas, and the mouth parts of early summer here where the sky pulls tarpward, contrails of dust and silver iodide in the nesting of premeditated demolitions.

How many worn-out windows have withstood drought after drought wandering under the same blue range? The vertical sleeve of an event points to its own wry energy, but fails to leave the testing ground with a real offer. The facts will locate the more remote range in the lobby of a river, in a tank from times the canoe out-whispered its own involution.

The vertical push of kangaroo crones, sealed aspics of vented apertures leading to insect windows of vegetable lust–a fruit rind of languors and soft Buddhas, of scallopshell and coptic impenetrabilities, pulled up by the foundation, trusses, girdles, floral and pantalooned, these magnanimous architectures of serendipitous islands in archipelagoed cross-shanties.

It’s building up as why I write dark scratches on the laboring through. I could spend a holiday mirror witness to the decrepitude. It’s how this interacts with what’s within, without. It’s the fire staring back on lines long since abandoned, my only tool a paperclip. The recitation’s  a worn-out combo of feathers carried by the satisfied disarray.

Cement and factories close minds, unfurl rivers

memory-wilted antlers

darklift cardboard, refulgent specklings of shadowy

portholes

The greyer guyser of pencil strokes is the unmost carrot of love anyone could’ve foretold. To post on Tumblr the scaled images of a lion, its hot and yellow head resting on each of these rarer beaches. Pins in his ear, fig strip towns and space, aged refuse in the company of a blackberry. The itinerary is hidden within parceled seeds of an opening; the cracked sidewalk of first thoughts in wet stone, fruit of a warpalace ripened to ecstasy. News blows in from roof to foundation and our unpeelings ratchet down the airwell tight. Each interested branch negotiates a window; each feather-decked trail curves under our stilts.